They stumble around comatose in the dark of night under dim street lights — circling — going nowhere.

The imagery seems plucked from an old school horror flick.

But in this real life sci-fi storyline, honey bees are playing the role of the living dead, bees that have been parasitized by the maggots of the Apocephalus borealis fly . The unscrupulous parasites are turning busy daytime foragers into night-time zom-bees.

Biologist John Hafernik, of San Francisco State University, has been monitoring the situation for four years.

“Known infections are primarily on the west coast,” he says. Just last month researchers confirmed the presence of zom-bees in Oregon and Washington.

These sightings fuel the possibility that bees are being parasitized in Canada — that they may already be buzzing around somewhere between live and death — in British Columbia. Hafernik cautions though, it’s too early to know where and if the phenomenon is spreading.

“We don’t know exactly how long this has been going on. It could be fairly recent. It could go back 100 years or more,” he says.

Hafernik says bee keepers in B.C. should not be alarmed. But they should be aware.

Following four years of research into the phenomenon the study, A New Threat to Honey Bees, the Parasitic Phorid Fly Apocephalus borealis, was published in PloS One this year.

To get a handle on the scale of the problem Hafernik is recruiting the assistance of “citizen scientists”.

He’s appealing to scientists, students, bee keepers and ordinary folks across the U.S. and Canada, who are willing to keep an eye out for the bilious bees, to chronicle their behaviour, take pictures and if possible set light traps to capture them and maybe even submit the specimens for further study.

Hafernik maintains he already has about 1,100 people supplying data to the website he launched this summer ZomBeeWatch.org.ZomBee Watch.

“It would be really helpful if they would set traps and see if their hives are infected. Even if they find their hives are infected it’s still not a reason to panic at this point. We don’t have evidence that this is something that is decimating hives. We’re trying to find out how big a problem it is.”

As well, research so far indicates the incidence of parasitism reaches into rigorous climates and is more intense in fall through to January, says Hafernik. There are records of the fly, which was identified in Maine in 1924, reaching as far as Alaska, Calgary and even near Toronto.

Hafernik does not want his message to sound alarming, “because not enough is known.”

But he wants people to be aware the overall situation is of real concern because honey bees are such important pollinators of agricultural crops. “Perhaps a third of what we put on our table is there because of some association with the honey bee,” he says.

The worst case scenario is that the zombie fly could be contributing to hive decline.

But because such sightings are rare, its potential for substantial damage has yet to be determined.

One of Hafernik’s graduate students Christopher Quock has been gluing tiny radio frequency I.D. chips onto the backs of bees that he’s parasitized in the lab, so he can observe their comings and goings. The chips help him track the bees as they enter and exit the hive. A control group which has not been parasitized offers a comparison model.

This is tricky work, admits Hafernik. But he explains, by cooling the bees down they become less active and easier to handle. He says bees don’t like cold weather which explains their reluctance to leave their hives at night.

Hafernik himself discovered the oddly behaving bees early one morning in late 2008. He was looking for bugs to feed a praying mantis in the university biology lab. To his horror, what he found was struggling bees crawling on the ground under a lamp standard in an apparent comatose state.

This was peculiar behavior because honey bees are daytime foragers, he explains.

They were behaving as if their minds were being controlled by an alien, he recalls.

“I scooped them up in a vial, brought them back to my office and fed the praying mantis.” But later he noticed one of the vials containing the bees was full of brown fly pupae that had emerged from the honey bees.

All was not right.

Hafernik wonders if their unusual absence from the hive at night might be a form of altruistic suicide — that the community centric bees would rather die outside the hive than risk infecting their mates.

“Honey bees are pretty clever creatures and they have a lot of altruistic behavior in their hives.”

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